


All Cats Are Grey

by DaisyNinjaGirl



Series: The More Loving One [2]
Category: AUSTEN Jane - Works, Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
Genre: But also some feelings, F/M, Mostly Pwp, Talking, Wedding Night, touch kink
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-03
Updated: 2021-02-02
Packaged: 2021-03-14 15:20:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29173296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DaisyNinjaGirl/pseuds/DaisyNinjaGirl
Summary: It was dark when Elinor Brandon first came to Delaford.
Relationships: Colonel Brandon/Elinor Dashwood
Series: The More Loving One [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2112096
Kudos: 34





	1. The Night Before

It was dark when Elinor Brandon first came to Delaford.

The little Dorset estate was close enough to her mother’s home that she and her husband had driven there on the day of their wedding; distant enough that night was well set in by the time they arrived, cutting away from the coach road into a dark and silent valley.

The servants had expected them: there was a groom waiting to care for the carriage horses, and a cold supper laid out by the housekeeper, unfamiliar people all. When they had finished eating, another stranger, a girl, led Elinor up to her new bedchamber, lit by candles, a built-up fire in the grate. The room was of an older, archaic age, with a four-poster bed with its curtains let down to make a little cave, the only open side facing the fire. Its bedposts were dark with age and heavily carved, the colours of the room unknowable in the shadows. The maid helped her out of her dress and brushed out and plaited her hair for her, bobbed a curtsey and left, leaving Elinor to sit on the high bed in her chemise, kicking her feet back and forth, hands pressed flat on the bedding.

There were voices outside the room – Brandon’s deep murmur talking to a servant on some necessary matter and then her husband came in, lit by candles, lit by the fire. He smiled awkwardly at her then, and moved about the room shedding the clothes of a country gentleman, hanging his coat and waistcoat, laying his breeches on a chair, peeling off stockings, never quite looking at her until at last he was in his own nightshirt, kneeling by the fire on some small business that occupied him longer than one might have thought necessary.

“Brandon?”

“My mother used to call me Christopher,” her husband said, looking over his shoulder at her. The fires hid the expression on his face.

“Christopher,” she said, mouthing the unfamiliar word she had spoken for the first time at their wedding service.

He got up and sat next to her, where her fingers were stroking the nubbled quilting of the coverlet on one side, the white linen sheet of the turned down bed on the other. He took one hand and held it, stroking her palm. “It’s alright, Elinor. We shall go just as slowly as you like.” This was his guarded face, Elinor realised, when he was trying to be gentle but didn’t quite know how. She turned his own hand over and kissed it. He ducked his head a little and held his palm to her face, then ran it around her neck, casual, almost impersonal, until he found a place near her hair line that made her tremble. He touched his lips to it, drew away, ran his hand down her shoulder and along her arm, curling her fingers inside his for a moment and away. He glanced at her a moment, questioning, and ran his hand up the inside of her arm now to let his fingers clasp her side, to run down her back and hold her hip a moment. He knelt, and that strong warm hand drifted down her thigh, past her knee, and he traced the line of her calf muscles, the bones of her foot with a smile, more considerate than a maid rolling down stockings. His hands were dark against her skin, against the white cotton of her nightdress, as if his years in India had baked the sun into him. Up again her other leg, and she shivered again when his fingers brushed the inside of her thigh and then away, cradling her buttock, up her back to find that delicate sensitive skin on her neck, hidden by her hair.

“May I see you?” she asked, shivering at the touch, and her husband stood away from her, a reserved man with his face less readable than ever, the firelight making his skin ruddy, gilded as a statue is gilded. He let his eyes drop, and with an almost sigh pulled his shirt over his head and stood there for her to see. His prick was erect, moving slightly as he breathed, and he sat down next to her again. “Not quite the same as in the paintings,” he said, his voice light and breathy, tilting his head to her.

Elinor reached out her own hand then to trace with a finger the smooth head, to feel the more raggedy skin of the shaft, curious at the veins she could see along its length. He showed her how to cup her hand around him and he closed his eyes and breathed deeply as she moved her hand, twitching in turn when her fingers brushed the soft skin of his belly. He clasped his hand over hers to stop it: “Enough, for now.” He kissed her temple. “It is good, but enough for now.”

“I was thinking—“

“Yes?”

“I was thinking that men and women don’t touch, until suddenly they do.”

Christopher took her hand then, and held it against his chest to feel the throb of his heart beating and she rested, head against his shoulder, biting her lip. Elinor made a decision then, and wriggled out of her chemise. She stood before the taller man, inches away from him, from the heat of a body, shivering in the not-cold room. He nodded, and put his broad strong hand on her belly, slid up her ribs to cup one breast—he bent and kissed the tip. She drew in her breath sharply and he drew back.

“No, I like it,” she said, and Christopher smiled gently and took her other breast into his mouth, touching her nipple with his tongue.

“Shall we lie down?” he asked, and she nodded abruptly. He went back to those long smooth strokes of his hand along her body, teaching her skin to be touched, running his calloused palm down her leg, along her arm, along her back, noting where she trembled and moving on, pausing only to drop a kiss. She was reminded, stupidly, of the way the better kind of riders were with their horses, who taught their animals how to be comfortable with them before they had to bear the weight of a rider. She hitched herself up, and began to explore her husband as well, feeling the hard muscle beneath his skin, the strange smell of him, running her hand up the long muscles of his leg, the curve where they became buttock, the bone of his hip, the nubs where his spine met his neck, the scatter of hair on his chest.

Christopher nudged her onto her back and crouched over her, planting kisses on her neck, on her face, her eyes, her mouth. She could feel his prick rubbing lightly on her belly, and that slow searching hand ran up the inside of her leg to find the curls that lay there, a gentle finger stroking the secret crevice that her mother had only ever talked about in the most allusive terms. She shifted and swallowed hard, feeling a surge of unfamiliar warmth. “Alright?” her husband asked, and she drew his face to hers and made him kiss her, and shifted again as his fingers moved. His face above her was unreadable, eyes gleaming by the firelight, until he looked down and away from her. Then he moved down her body, kissing her breasts again and her stomach, her neck, and she felt probing, fumbling, and the weight of a man inside her.

Elinor bucked at the intrusion, for intrusion it was, and Christopher stilled, watching her carefully until she could relax and receive him. He began to move then, gently rocking, little pushes that she could follow, could accept. She flinched at a sharp bright pain, and he stilled again. “Sorry,” he whispered, his face wry, “would you like to stop now?” and she shook her head.

The pushing became more insistent, deeper, faster, and here, now, _this_ was too much. The face above her was a stranger’s, a lion’s mask, snarling, her hands were pinned; old words ran through her head, from plays she and her sister had read to each other and thought they understood: to be tempted by words too large, to know the heat of a luxurious bed, to die in one’s lap, to be heavier, heavier by the weight of a man – she wriggled her hands free from the man above her and held his hips to slow that rocking, to slow it, and, to her surprise, to pull him deeper and deeper into herself, to curl herself around that heat. Elinor cried out then; she didn’t mean to, but she cried out; and the man above her shuddered and came to a rest.

They lay there for a little, one on the other, until Christopher rolled onto his side and stroked the hair away from her face. “Is all well?” he asked.

Elinor sat up, unused to and unsure of the sweat slick all over her skin, the wet about her thighs, the _worked_ feeling inside her. She cried then; she didn’t want to, but she cried, for that long strange day, because she would never be a child again; she cried because many of the reasons for this marriage were good but not all of them, and all the choices that she _could_ make had been made. And she wept because she had married a kind man who wanted her to be happy. Brandon let her have her cry out, sitting next to her with his arms wrapped around her, murmuring nothing words into her hair.

She fell asleep with his arms wrapped around her in that dark velvet cave, feeling a heart beating against her back and the glimmer of the candles guttering out. She slept.

***

It was lighter when she woke, but not true morning. Someone had pulled back the swathes of velvet hangings from around the ancient bed, but the curtains were closed and she could see only by the light creeping in through the cracks. It was a grey room that was hers now, with ornate plasterwork on the ceiling and dark wallpaper with swirling rococo patterns all over it, the relic of an older age. She lay still, thinking of the things she ought to do today, the responsible acts of married life a lady should do: there was the servant’s hall to be visited, and the housekeeper at least to be flattered; it was important that she visit the house in the village where Brandon’s little ward, Eliza William’s daughter, was to be fostered. And, she sighed, there would be a formal visit by the parson and his new wife, residents of this little village for six months before her. It would be _expected_ , she knew, that she and Lucy should make a semblance of friendship. But all of it could wait. She lay there, considering the worked feeling inside her, slightly sore, somewhat something _other_.

Elinor rolled over, under the heavy arm that had laid across her hip. Brandon was watching her carefully, warily even, with his hand cradled protectively, loosely, across her stomach. “Is all well?” he asked, “did you sleep well?” and she saw again what her sister had never understood: a guarded man fighting hard to be gentle with someone he cared for. Her mouth twitched, and she traced the corner of his eye with her thumb. All her instincts, the habits of decades living with three females who existed in a state of heightened sensibility, were to draw back into her own reserve; to wait and see; to avoid commitment. And that she knew was fool’s gold, a false treasure to bring to this marriage.

“Wait here,” she said suddenly. She rolled out of the high bed and rubbed her arms in the cold morning air, rooted on the floor for the chemise she had abandoned last night. “ _Stay.”_ She hopped about the room on chilly feet pulling the curtains and peering out the panes of the mullioned window. The mulberry tree was all that Mrs Jennings had promised, rimed now with frost; the walled garden was snug with its fruit trees pruned tight for the winter, safe against their protective wall. Too cold, and she danced about with the tasks necessary to make the day feel like morning to her: poking up the fire, (blushing) using the chamber pot, standing on a little rug before a mirror to take the curling rags out of her hair. Did she really need these? Elinor wondered, as she teased out the curls around her face. They had been a daily task for as long as she could remember, but did she _need_ them? Could she let that little vanity go, and let her hair be straightly honest? “Here stands Elinor, the married woman,” she said to herself. Behind her, Christopher was leaning on his elbow watching her. “Stay,” she repeated. In the open daylight she could see her husband properly at last. The skin of his chest was paler than his face and hands, as pale as hers even; and the brush of hair on his chest as ginger as on his head, his eyebrows were crooked. She could see, now, the ridges of scars that she had felt, unknowing in the dark.

“Are you _always_ this wide awake in the morning?” he said, bemused.

“I normally go for a walk before breakfast,” and she turned and shushed him with her hands as he moved to rise. “Not this morning.” Shivering in the cold air, she crawled back into the grand old bed and put Christopher’s hand possessively on her hip. “No one ever expects to see a new bride,” she said seriously, “they just never explained _why._ ”

Christopher barked with laughter, and she settled in happily to the feel of a warm calloused hand sliding up her back, along her leg, her side, curled fingers tracing her breast. She insisted that hers would be a good marriage.


	2. The Morning After

It was morning in Delaford, her first morning, and Elinor was brilliantly, gloriously wide awake. The body next to her was less so, Brandon’s—Christopher’s eyes were sleepy, his body wrapped in a sheet, and he half-smiled like a smug, happy caterpillar, the lines on his face releasing, the fall of ginger hair new-washed for his wedding, his hands as warm as promised.

“Are you always like this in the morning?” he asked again, as he ran his hand along her side and she shivered.

“Are _you_ always like this?” she said, because there was a hot hard lump pressing on her thigh through the thin fabric of her chemise.

“Well—many men are, actually,” he said. “When would any of them tell you?” He rolled out of bed and, avoiding her gaze, used the chamber pot himself. Elinor stared at the wall, awkward, aware that there was a small patch of dried blood on the sheet next to her.

“Let’s get this off you,” he said, tugging at the hem of her chemise, “I’ll warm you up,” he promised. This was not, as she had wondered, another rite of marriage exactly. He got her to lie face down on the bed and dug strong fingers into the muscles of her back, finding tender places she hadn’t known were sore and smoothing them out until she felt like she was melting. She felt him lift her braid and untie the ribbon, felt it smoothed in a fan across her back. “Your hair is so fine,” he said, rubbing a lock between fingers and thumb.

“It’s terrible to brush if I let it get tangled,” she warned.

“I’ll help you comb it out,” he promised.

She rolled over and sat up. “Lie down then,” and she held him down with the weight of her arms, using her thumbs as he had to walk up the muscles along his spine, to dig into the thick slabs of muscles around his shoulders until he was curled into the pillow, relaxed, looking like he wanted to purr like a cat. “Marianne used to think you had the rheumatism,” she said, feeling the thick scars in his shoulder.

“It does hurt when the weather is wet, true enough,” he said sleepily.

“What happened?”

“A little skirmish in a little temple wood—not worth mentioning in the dispatches—a long time in a camp hospital sweating out a fever after. Much of soldiery is unglamourous, I found.” He hissed suddenly, and she drew back—he caught her hand and returned it. “Like this helps, sometimes,” and she smoothed out the scar until he had settled again. She patted his shoulder and lay down next to him, snuggling in. She thought for a moment and picked up one of his hands to wrap it around the curve of her breast, where it felt warm against the chilly air.

One sleepy eye opened. “Are you sure you’re not sore?” her husband asked.

“Well—I am. It’s just—there were all these well-meaning matrons telling me not to worry, because of course my wedding night would hurt, but _then_ I’d have all the advantages of being married. They didn’t tell me about the other.”

“That was unkind,” Christopher said. He rubbed his thumb gently on her nipple. “God made your body to feel pleasure.” She shivered, and his mouth quirked. “The ‘little death’ they call it.”

“Who calls it?”

“Well, my mistress in Calcutta for one. She was a French girl—Amélie—and _very_ scathing about how Englishmen treat their wives. _Le petit mort_ , she used to say _._ ”

“Oh,” Elinor said. “Did she teach you how to—?” she ran her hands along his back in explanation.

“My mistress in Bombay did. Not a French girl.”

She considered this. “What was her name? Did you like her?”

“Her name was Sona, and I did like her,” he said gravely. “There are transactions in such things, but I think she liked me well enough.”

She nodded, and ran her hand along his hip, explored gently the curl of hair at his crotch, his solid prick and the soft sac underneath. She felt a twitch against her hand and giggled.

“ _Un_ kind,” Christopher said, but he didn’t move her hand away, and she felt his own hand exploring between her legs, felt long fingers slide inside her and she arched and wriggled because there were butterfly kisses inside her, breath and butterfly kisses against her neck. She wriggled again, and tugged, trying to shift the weight of her husband on top of her. He bent his head and kissed her forehead and looked at her, considering; supported his weight on his arms to make a little cave over and around her.

“Did you have any mistresses in England,” she asked, moving so that she could feel his prick pressed up against her. “In Kent or, or, Tunbridge Wells?”

“I did have a mistress, in Bath,” he said kindly. “And, yes, I liked her. She was a merry widow who,” he affected a Somersetshire accent, “’liked a body to keep her warm of nights.’ I haven’t seen her in years,” he added carefully, but there was affection as he said it.

“Did you… do they call it paying off?” she asked, shifting her hips.

“She sent _me_ away,” he said with a laugh in his voice. “She wanted to marry again and she said her heart was only big enough for one person at a time. I didn’t go to her wedding, but we parted as friends.”

“I’m glad,” she said shyly, and he kissed her.

His hands were everywhere and nowhere, curling around her breast, running down her leg and tugging her knee up. She liked this rite better in the daylight, she knew already, she liked being able to see who touched her, to know him with her eyes as well as her hands. She touched him again, moved his prick against her crotch. “Please?” she asked.

He bowed his head, and moved to enter her. She arched her back, feeling the new remembered feelings of resistance and release, of intrusion and surrender. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, letting herself be carried by sensation. When she opened them, her husband’s face was curious, concerned, watching her intently, and she brushed her hair away from her eyes, shifted to pull it out from under her shoulders.

“Was there anyone else?” she asked, finding she could move her hips to meet him, feeling her skin break out in a sweat, seeing her husband’s skin growing ruddier.

“A friend,” Brandon said, and here he became guarded again, still; that closed face he had when talking about something that mattered greatly. She traced out some crow’s feet. “Don’t tell me, Christopher. Don’t tell me your secrets until you want to. Unless you want to.” 

He nodded barely, eyes flickering. “Shall we—?” and he stopped speaking for she had to curl herself around a surge that was as intense as it had been unprompted. When she was herself again, her husband was looking down at her with his face creased up as if trying not to laugh.

“I hardly ever do this,” she told him seriously, and then he _did_ laugh, and she did too, giggling together skin to skin, bound up in each other. “Yes, shall we?” and then her husband filled her up and there was no more time for words.

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first time posting an E rated story, and I am shy, so have disabled comments.


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